PRO FOOTBALL

PRO FOOTBALL; Johnson Has the Team; Now, for a New Stadium

By RICHARD SANDOMIR

Published: January 19, 2000

In his first hour as the new owner of the Jets, Robert Wood Johnson IV insisted that his team would leave Giants Stadium after its lease expires in 2008.

''Eight years from now, they will be playing somewhere else,'' Johnson said yesterday after National Football League owners voted, 29-0, to approve his $635 million purchase. Atlanta and St. Louis were not there. ''The Jets have never had their own stadium. Every game they have played for the last 39-plus years have been away games.''

When the Jets left Shea Stadium -- more home to baseball and the Mets -- in 1984, they moved into a facility built expressly for football and one with clean rest rooms to please the late owner Leon Hess. But the Jets' lease is one of the N.F.L.'s worst, placing them at a disadvantage to teams in new, revenue-rich stadiums.

''We would have to depart that facility,'' Johnson said of Giants Stadium. ''This is an area that I think would be very important ultimately for the Jets.''

The immediate prospects for relocation include the West Side rail yards in Manhattan, a site proposed by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani for a domed football and Olympic stadium, and Shea Stadium, which Fred Wilpon, the Mets' co-owner, has proposed overhauling for football when the Mets' new stadium is built.

''We have a design scheme to do a first-class stadium with luxury suites and everything else you'd need,'' Wilpon said. ''The mayor is aware of the sketches and likes them.''

Wilpon described the plan as an extensive, but not a total overhaul of the 36-year-old stadium, which would add about 20,000 seats to its existing capacity of 55,575.

''If you look at the outfield from the press box, you see a U-shape,'' Wilpon said. ''You'd almost enclose the U and add seats.''

Giuliani has suggested building an enclosed football stadium that would help attract the 2012 Summer Olympics to New York.

Yesterday, Johnson said that he would meet soon with Giuliani, but ''not this week,'' referring to the pressing task of persuading Bill Parcells to unretire as head coach or naming his successor.

The Jets are a cornerstone tenant at the Meadowlands Sports Complex. The landlord, the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, cannot afford to lose the Jets, and the main tenants of Continental Arena, the Nets and Devils, who want new arenas but may end up under one roof in Newark.

''If his intention is the development of a stadium after the lease expires, that's something we'd be interested in being involved in,'' John Samerjan, a spokesman for the sports authority, said.

Although the Jets are profitable, Johnson needs a lot of new revenues to justify paying $635 million. ''Everything is based on future revenues,'' he said.

During the 1999 season, the Jets generated $39.3 million in gross stadium revenues but paid the sports authority $4.8 million in rent and visiting teams $12.9 million.

By contrast, the Washington Redskins generated gross stadium revenues of $88.1 million in 1998, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers $65.5 million and the Carolina Panthers $63.5 million, according to estimates by Michael Ozanian, the statistics editor of Forbes magazines. All three teams play in new stadiums.

Johnson, who covets similarly sweet cash flows, said he was a devout football fan who had attended games with the Hess family. But he never contemplated buying the team until Hess died last May.

''This is basically the moment that I had the stars lined up for me to be able to do it,'' he said.

In early December, Johnson and Charles F. Dolan, the chairman of Cablevision, became the two last bidders. Both had to show the financial ability to afford $500 million or more.

''That's just the price of entry to buy an N.F.L. team,'' Johnson said. Although he can evidently afford the acquisition, he said, ''I flinched the whole way'' at the price.

In the final bidding, ownership tilted toward Johnson because Dolan's business interests -- including cable television systems serving 3.4 million subscribers, Madison Square Garden, the Knicks and the Rangers -- concerned N.F.L. owners.

Johnson said he never perceived an edge because his business interests did not make owners fret.

''I was not confident at all,'' he said. ''The only thing that gave me ultimate confidence was when John Hess walked into the room and I saw his hand kind of reaching in my direction.'' Last Tuesday, John Hess, an executor of his father's estate, chose Johnson over Dolan at a meeting of the N.F.L. finance committee. The handshake came after Johnson raised his bid by $10 million.